I can hardly believe classes are over. I have been so blessed by fifty-two talented and interested students this year. Some moments I'll remember from this year: the amazing weather this spring when we could bring our whiteboards outside and learn physics in the sunshine, the ridiculous errors I made and the comfortable atmosphere we had where we could laugh about them, far too many velociraptor problems, and watching friendships grow between students as they learned together.
The experience certainly convinced me that I would like to make teaching a big part of my career. As described in part 1 of this post, the question of what I want to be when I grow up is mostly answered. So the question of this blog post is: what sort of teacher do I want to be when I grow up? Now I don't have the foggiest idea if I want to be a high school teacher or a prof, a physics teacher or a special education teacher, etc. I do know, however, as every teacher does, that I want to be a great teacher. But when I think of great teachers I've met, they're all so different - so what is it that makes a teacher great?
Well, maybe it starts with not thinking so much about "being a great teacher", but rather focusing on helping my students get where they need to go. As someone who thinks far too much about things, it's easy for me to focus on my teaching rather than on my students' learning. And I think that's an unfortunate place to go - this is how we make teachers who spend hours preparing the most beautiful derivations to write on the black board, but are unaware that their class is actually just having a nap.
Alright, by now you must be thinking - is she actually just going to spend an entire blog post just rephrasing a question without ever really answering it? Yes. That is exactly what I'm doing. The fact is, I just don't know the answer. But...
There are at least some things I am pretty sure of. For example, one of the things I've been researching is what motivates students to go on into second year physics. For my male students, strong conceptual understanding and high grades were highly correlated with choosing a physics major. Makes sense. But for my female students, who have the experience of being a minority in the class, the only two variables I found which correlated with retention were a) their physics self-efficacy (aka confidence in doing physics) and b) the extent to which they felt that the prof and TAs cared about them. This is great because I certainly want to be the sort of teacher who shows my students that I care about them - not just because this could reduce the gender gap, but because I think it is simply a human way to live life. We were created to care about others and to be cared about - it only makes sense for this to happen in the classroom, in discussions about future career plans in the foyer, etc.
Feeling cared about is important to students, particularly the female students in my class, but we can't stop there. Students obviously need the opportunity to build an understanding of the physical world if they're going to be successful in physics. I'm currently really interested in the research suggesting that social environments can be very successful in doing this - that we can build understanding better with others than we can alone. If this is the case, "good teaching" involves less of the traditional download of information through a lecture, and more questions, more stepping back and assisting students as they form new knowledge problem solving together. Practically, this has been a really fun strategy to work on and tweak this year in tutorial.
Alright then, so far we can be fairly comfortable saying that students certainly need to know they are valued and cared about, and they certainly need to learn to do good physics. But this still doesn't seem like a very complete picture of good teaching. I have bigger goals for my students than that they merely be great physicists - I want them to be great people. I want them to care about each other and about the world, and I want them to be inspired to act on that love in selfless, genuine, and thoughtful ways. This is a challenging goal. So let me diverge to look at some examples of this through an analogy to film - I promise that this really will tie back into teaching, so do bear with me.
So I went to see Hunger Games the other day. And I really appreciated the themes the story brought to light. First, the idea of impacting change by acting together: At one point, the main character says, referring to a televised game in which children are forced to kill each other, "What if they all just stopped watching? There would be no Hunger Games." She is of course reminded that this will never happen. Though few people would intentionally kill an innocent child, the public continues to fund these atrocities with their choice of viewing material. The public collectively has the ability to end the games, but no one believes they hold this power - it's the thought process of, "The games will probably occur anyway, so what could be the harm in my watching it?"
The Hunger Games may be set in a post-apocalyptic world, but this theme certainly strikes a chord with our present day. Few pornography viewers would intentionally abuse women, yet every click directly funds this abuse. Few shoppers believe in inhumane working conditions or child labour, but how often do I look into the origin of my new blouse or gadget before I buy it? We could end the porn industry and drastically improve working conditions for employees in other countries. Yet we choose not to, because it's just too tempting to view the small difference our decisions make as being zero difference. (A physics aside: dx may be infinitesimally small, but it's not zero. And in fact when we integrate up all the little dx's we can get something actually quite big.) On top of this, we know these issues are complex, and solutions are not easy to come by. But knowing the complexities involved in finding actual solutions can't simply remove our personal responsibility for our choices to fund abuse.
This brings to mind a second theme in the Hunger Games: the power of the media in inspiring people to act cohesively without necessarily taking thoughtful consideration. At the start of the games, the public is told through video and speeches that the games are a wonderful thing. The children are bringing "honour" to their district, and the games are promoting "peace" by keeping the districts under the rule of the capitol. Of course, many of those directly involved know that this is not true, as evidenced when the father of one of the murdered children sparks a riot. But the crowds, who aren't personally involved, roar with applause at these statements of supposed honour and peace.
A more current example would of course be the Kony 2012 campaign. Many of us saw the emotionally charged video which encouraged us to support Invisible Children in bringing a very horrible man to justice. Watching the video, I think most people would agree that it just felt like such a great campaign - especially from our perspective as people who aren't personally involved. But fortunately, the same technology, which quickly spread the Kony 2012 campaign, also shared with us the responses of Ugandans to the film, such as this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVY5jBnD-E. In her response, this speaker describes the devaluing consequences of reducing horrific events to a "just catch the bad guy" black and white issue, while intentionally ignoring the complexities of the situation. Facebook postings about Kony 2012 soon came down as we started to consider what our support meant and the impact it had. We asked hard questions such as: "How can we actually go about bringing Kony to justice without many innocent deaths - particularly of the children we hoped to protect?" Of great importance, we took a tough look at our personal motivations: were we truly concerned and willing to make genuine sacrifices for our fellow human beings? Or in promoting Kony 2012, were we simply boosting our already ridiculous western Saviour complex, at the expense of Ugandans?
I could probably just ramble on all day about these things. But this is a teaching blog after all, and I promised that this does indeed have everything to do with answering the question of what kind of teacher I want to be. So let's try to get to some semblance of a "point".
I want to teach more than physics. I want to first inspire in my students an understanding that they have the ability to effect enormous change, especially when they act cohesively. But second, I want to teach them to use this very carefully - to think deeply about how the decisions they make effect others, and to act accordingly. We first need to recognize that we can do something about the abuse in the porn industry, the deplorable working conditions in some factories, the atrocities committed against child soldiers, and the many other issues facing our world - we need to realize that our individual choices do make a difference in these situations and can be used for great good. But we also need to recognize that our choices can also be used negatively, and that in acting cohesively without thinking deeply about the complexities in these issues, we can actually make things quite a bit worse. We work through physics problems in tutorial, but I want my students to find thoughtful solutions to the problems that I don't know the answer to. And want them to be inspired to act on these solutions.
The challenge is that I have no idea how to be this sort of teacher. Seriously, no idea. I don't even know if this is entirely the kind of teacher I should be aiming to be - there's likely many important aspects of good teaching which I'm not yet even aware of.
But maybe the question of "what kind of teacher do I want to be when I grow up?" is a false one (if I could have just one more rephrasing of the question). I like to think that I'll always be "growing up" as a teacher, but never really arriving at some perfect understanding of what a great teacher is, or how to be this great teacher. Maybe the only "bad" teacher is a teacher who has stopped learning. And if that's true, then I'm okay with the fact that I have no idea how to be the teacher I want to be right now. It simply means that I have lots of time to learn from my students, from fellow teachers and from you - lots of time before I have to worry about running out of things to learn about teaching :)
